


Torn and Frayed

by nightingveil



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 16:58:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightingveil/pseuds/nightingveil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a distant world, unseen from Earth, and unknown to most individuals on both planets, the caste system is stringent, the people a collection of survivors, and wars are common. One scribe is different than many of his people, and dissatisfied with the status quo. The philosophy that the world is built on, says all women either are slaves or want to be, and all men are masters. He's about to test that theory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Torn and Frayed

I don’t know what made me wake up. A sound maybe. A scurrying noise off to the side, the jangling of metal or simply the dull throb in my temples escalating to a roar. I only know I struggled to open my eyes, and they didn’t want to cooperate. My eyelids felt so heavy, but after they flickered a few times, I could see light. There was the scurrying sound again, closer this time or possibly my senses were only making me more aware of my environment.

Rolling my shoulders back, I felt my back protest, the muscles formerly wound tight, now lengthening out as they ought to be. It felt easier to breathe, but in the blink of an eye, comfort wasn’t my goal anymore. There was the metallic sound again, and I blearily gazed at my wrists, seeing they were in cuffs. Damn. These weren’t handcuffs like the police used. They were about half an inch wide, kept secure with a padlock, and there was a length of equally rusting chain running between them. I tried gripping each one by the opposite hand, turning my wrists side to side and collapsing my palms, desperately trying to squirm my way out. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get even my hands small enough to free them, and much as I was used to pain after the imprint of needles creating my ink, this friction was making my wrists nothing short of raw. I put my hands on my lap, noticing that I had on a pair of rough pants with a drawstring waist, and that the space was lit by torches. 

There was enough chain that I could put my hands on either side of my hips, bracing myself for the next act. My fingertips slid over the floor to either side of me, and I realized for the first time that the floor was stone, rough, and that the only thing between us was a mat. Not one of those nice yoga mats either, all padded out and brightly colored. This thing was thin, falling apart around the edges, and seemed to be woven of some kind of fiber. In total, it must have taken me about ten minutes just to get my muscles coordinated to let me just sit upright, attempt escape, and turn my head while my eyes squinted to make out shapes. 

The air was musty. After a childhood of breathing problems, and adulthood with pot and cigarettes, I still felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I heard that scurrying again, jerking my hand back when some… thing…crawled by me. It had looked like a rat, but larger, and I could have sworn it had two rows of teeth. It ran into a hole in the wall, which was also the same rough stone as the floor, but that didn’t keep my attention long. I’d seen them. 

Bars. I was in a jail. No, not a jail. It was too small for that. I was shorter than a lot of guys, and as I shakily got to my feet, there was only an inch or two of height above me. It was a cage. I looked back at the mat, then up, and then at the bars that actually kept me separated from the stone walls. Small. Small. It kept going through my head, adding to the already claustrophobic feeling setting in. The only thing I hated worse than confined spaces, was spiders. Feeling sick, I sucked in the deepest breath I could, and only then saw the man that had come to stand outside my barrier. 

“Hey! Hey, what’s with this? This…fucking…cage. I don’t know whose…” was as far as I got, because he snapped something at me, but I couldn’t make out what he said. It wasn’t English. German maybe? I didn’t know, and that threw me almost as much as everything else going on. 

Going up to the front of the bars, I did what most prisoners would do, winding my fingers around them so I could get some measure of comfort. They were just fingers, but they were free. I was about to say something else to the guy when he opened the lock on the barred door to the actual room, then approached the front of the cage where I was standing. I looked upward, watching him roll tumblers on another lock, the one keeping me imprisoned. Once he had the thing unlocked, he didn’t give me time to step out of the cage on my own, just grabbed me by the arm, and started twisting it around to see the various pieces I’d had made a permanent part of my anatomy. 

Disgust. I’d seen that expression before, when someone was looking at my ink. My own father had freaked when I got my astrological symbol of the scorpion done my neck. You get enough of it, the ink, and people are going to make their own assumptions about your status, and your IQ. This wasn’t like this though. This was…different. He was snearing, an overkill expression if I’d ever seen one, and I jerked my arm free. 

“What? You never saw a tattoo before?” Using more bravado than I felt, I was smiling at him, my chin up. The guy wasn’t that much taller than I was. Four inches at most. But he was built, chiseled, and I just caught onto the fact he was wearing a skirt. What the…? The understanding set in, just before he doubled up a fist, letting it make contact with my jawline. 

I didn’t even get to fall. My eyes were swimming with the kinds of stars he’d just looked so disgusted at, and his hand was wrapping over the real ones to drag me out of the cage. I was stumbling, not able to get my feet securely underneath me, until we reached a group of stairs outside the room. He let me go, but he also prodded me from behind, barking something in that guttural-sounding language again. He kept on pushing me, and I didn’t want to push my luck, so I went up the stairs ahead of him. Still, I kept on my game face, hell bent on looking a lot more relaxed about this than I actually was. My eyes were tracking though, looking for any place I might be able to slide into, any means of escape. 

At the head of them, we came to a single door, which he knocked on a few times. There wasn’t an answer from the other side, but he opened it anyway, and shoved me ahead of him with enough force that my knees buckled. More flooring, but this one was wooden, with a high polish. Not that it made my knees feel any better, and after dragging in another labored breath, I tilted my head back to see the room to which it belonged.

Like the floor, this room was totally different than the space below. For one thing, it was darker. There had been torches on the walls in the cell area, and all up along the edges of the stairs, but this room only had the glow from a single candle. I did briefly get that there were thick curtains shrouding the windows, that they pooled on the floor, and that they didn’t allow any light to permeate the room. I had no idea if it was night or day, but that didn’t matter right now. The guy was behind me, but there was someone else in the room. 

Another man. He was at a desk, the kind of desk I expected someone like a president to own, long and carved out along the front and on the legs, polished so it managed to gleam from the light of the one candle. It was the sort of thing we never saw in the part of Jersey where I grew up, never thought I would see. His posture was upright, stiff, but I guess it had to be since he was sitting on a backless stool that had swirls and figures that echoed the ones on the desk. 

The man was writing, and still hadn’t turned around, so I couldn’t make out much about him beyond that he was wearing something black and his hair matched it almost exactly. He just kept scrawling on a piece of paper, acting like no one else was in the room. So, I went for it.

“Look, if this is a sick joke, it’s not funny. Where the hell am I?” Funny. I knew funny. I was the original prankster, but then it occurred to me that maybe paybacks were hell, and this was it. The guy just kept on writing, and I started to yell at him, when he suddenly lifted a hand. It was holding the pen. Or was that a stylus, like a DS used? Whatever it was, it kept me quiet. Or rather, the motion did. 

Most people never catch on that I like details, that I notice a lot. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be so dedicated to my music, adept at creating just the right melody. The gesture was the kind that said he knew what he was doing. More to the point, he was a man in power, and it only required that he do that lifting in order to be obeyed. Striking that thought from my head, I began noticing his fingers. They were long, pale, elegant even. Not expecting that to pop into my head over some other guy’s fingers, I was caught off guard. 

He was saying something, and it must have been in the same language the other guy used, but it sounded smoother. It was soft, but it did the trick, because the guy behind me was leaving the room. Once the door was closed behind me, I heard it being locked, and the man at the desk set the stylus down. 

Turning about on the stool where he’d been sitting, he lifted to his feet, and I saw that he was taller than I had anticipated. Although I was on my knees still, I would have guessed he stood at somewhere around five nine. Sure, that might not be tall to someone else, but I only stand at five-six on a good day. He left the candle on the desk, as if to prove he didn't need even its help to make it across the span that separated us. That meant he knew this layout well, and that bothered me. I started to get up, but the room was still not that steady. Anyway, I was still wearing the manacles, my upper body was bare of a stitch of clothing, and I was left to wonder who undressed me in the first place. I didn’t like this. It wasn’t okay. 

The black that he was wearing, despite the low level of illumination, I could make out more about it now. It started from the high buttoned neckline of his shirt, the sort that almost reached the underside of the chin. A Mandarin, I think I recalled someone saying, one time. The black continued all the way down to a pair of boots, broken up only by one straight row of buttons, and they were covered in the same material that made up the dress. Dumbfounded. He was wearing a dress. No, not a dress. Robes? Yea, like the kind you see in old movies from the UK, where the judges are passing verdict on someone. I didn’t like the mental comparison, and I would have gotten up, but he’d already made his progress toward me with enough silent prowess that before I knew it, he was standing directly in front of me. There was nowhere to go. 

Steadying myself for the worst, I looked up at him, determined not to convey the anger and building anxiety by letting them show on my face. My teeth were clenched, but I forced myself to relax them, just in case he cuffed me like the other guy had. Only he didn’t. He didn’t so much as touch me. In a way, that was worse. Someone comes at you, you can fight them. I could cut off his wind supply with that chain. That was going through my head, but it was cut short by the study he was giving me.

His eyes were steady, with black, thickly arched eyebrows, but it was the color that had me riveted. A strange shade. Someone else would have just called them brown or even hazel, but as I said, I was into details. They were a dark shadow of olive, warm, and there was an intelligence in that lit up his whole face. Something in the pit of my stomach turned, so I swallowed once, and tried to study him as closely as he was using those mesmerizing eyes in his scrutiny me. A broad face, very pale, but with full cheekbones, and it made me think of one of my horror movie vampires. His was a perfectly straight nose, and a mouth slightly on this side of thin, but that fit his face proportionately. There was that cupid’s bow perfection sort of thing to it, and I thought to myself, “He’s beautiful…”. Whoa Frankie. Handsome. He was handsome. There, that made it better, and I could breathe again. I hadn’t known I was holding it in, until I let the air out of my lungs in a slow push. 

He smiled then. Based on the previous treatment, I would have expected something with derision or cruelty, but he didn’t appear that way at all. It was a barely there sort of expression, just lifting the very corners of his mouth, and it struck me what intrigued the most. He looked so…innocent. Pleased too. I didn’t get why, but the impression was that it had to do with me, and he even nodded as if either confirming what I’d just imagined or his own thoughts. When he spoke again, I wasn’t ready for it. 

“Welcome to my home, and to Rigel.” The lift to his lips increased, and whatever breath I’d had, it got all caught up in my chest again. This time, it was a combination of the illuminating effect the alteration of expression had on his whole demeanor, the soft texture of his voice, and the string of words that followed his welcome. 

“I am called Gerard, of the Caste of Scribes, and you are now my slave.” He was saying it without a trace of irony, and much as I wanted to question it, to yell at him that he was insane, I knew he was telling the truth.

The truth. It was the last thing I remember before I passed out.


End file.
